goldmab

Thanks. I think a lot of them agree that low-carb approaches work for weight loss and some other outcomes, since that's what the science shows. But his "insulin hypothesis" is pure pseudoscience and I'm not aware of any papers about it.

It took me a little reading to figure out the agenda, but some key phrases like "obesity is a growth disorder" tipped me off. This is a Gary Taubes project. He is a writer of books in favor of low-carbohydrate diets, and he often badly misinterprets the scientific literature. He has a selection bias about which studies he thinks are worth talking about, so as to make it appear that low-carbohydrate diets are the answer to everything. No actual nutritional scientists think his "alternate hypothesis" is credible.

This is a fun demo of functional programming, but Lisp isn't so special anymore. In Python:

  >>> def deriv(f):
  ...   dx = 0.0001
  ...   def fp(x):
  ...     return (f(x + dx) - f(x)) / dx
  ...   return fp
  ...
  >>> cube = lambda x: x**3
  >>> deriv(cube)(2.0)
  12.000600010022566

Anti-semitism isn't always about religion. Sometimes it's just racism.

Does this bother you? I think they are just trying to eliminate management overhead by using peer evaluation to set the company's direction by consensus. This could maybe be chaotic, but I see it as a trade-off. A traditional structure is chaotic in its own way. Like, who gets promoted to upper management? The most deserving people, or lucky people?

Arbitrary decisions from an executive may or may not be better than popularity contests. I guess it depends on the executives and the culture.

CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI are actually really hard to do well. Think of all unusable and unstable CRUD apps you've used. I wouldn't drill someone on dynamic programming for that kind of job, but I would want them to be smart enough and dedicated enough to do it well. In my experience that's rare.

While on a 1:1 audio call, users will see content that could spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users and highlight unique and local brand experiences. So, you should think of Conversation Ads as a way for Skype to generate fun interactivity between your circle of friends and family and the brands you care about. Ultimately, we believe this will help make Skype a more engaging and useful place to have your conversations each and every day.

How can Skype pretend something is desirable if it goes away automatically when you pay? That's nearly the definition of undesirable.

I'm a Ruby developer who never uses Rails, and I think this is a major problem. It makes it hard for me to embrace "Ruby developer" as a career path because that means I'll be typecast as a Rails dev, and I don't want to use Rails.

My TV has rabbit ears. I can watch NFL games in high definition with them for free.

I call bullshit. If this guy was bored because all of his software projects were exactly the same, he should have automated their creation and reused his code so that they took an extremely short amount of time to create. Anyone who can't do that is either encountering novel problems that require decisions, or just not a good enough programmer to automate and reuse.

This is the same way I feel when programmers complain about writing "just another CRUD app." CRUD apps are in fact very difficult to write because of usability concerns. If all of your "create" screens look exactly the same no matter what is being created, that means you are making no effort as a UI designer to anticipate common creation patterns. Even assuming a cookie-cutter UI, a CRUD programmer has to properly model the concepts in data, which is not trivial either.

What kind of thought process and/or experimentation led you to that algorithm?

Yep. I learned music theory in the course of learning to play single-note woodwind instruments. There's a lot of focus on scales and intervals.

If you want to learn to play guitar, the wrong approach is to pick up a book about music theory and a chart showing where all the notes are on the fretboard.

I found music theory knowledge very helpful when learning how to play guitar. In fact, if somebody knows what intervals a minor triad and a major triad are made of, and they know what note each string of the guitar is, then they can work out how to play a lot of chords.

Of course brains produce false models and find wrong patterns. Modeling and pattern-matching is what brains do. So they're going to get it wrong a lot.

The interesting thing isn't how funny it is that the mind screws up sometimes, it's knowing the actual mechanisms of perception, cognition, memory, behavior, etc. Edge cases and failures are only the beginning of understanding, because they hint at how things work.

For example, visual perception is heavily based on detecting edges. So there are a set of optical illusions where you fail to accurately perceive the colors or shades of different areas (like the chessboard illusion), because the relative shading of adjacent areas is more important for producing edges and shapes in your mind.

We have no better idea what the typical mind is like than we did a hundred years ago

I can't take this statement seriously. Have you ever even taken an intro cognition or perception class? Almost everything is about how minds typically work, and all of the findings are less than one hundred years old.

Shouldn't this page be more clear about the fact that this completely insecure and not currently suitable for any public website, due to the unlimited database rights?

My favorite part was this analogy by Guido van Rossum:

In Python, I would just say something like, ‘Get up and go through the door.’ In other languages, I might have to say something like, ‘Stand up, but not with so much force that you fall over, take three steps to the north, take one step to the east, approach the door, check that it is open, if it is not open, open it, then step through it with this amount of speed …’

The advantage that Zuckerberg got from writing Facebook himself wasn't that he could "spend less on coders," it's that Facebook got created at all. Meanwhile, he had been contracted by the Winklevoss twins to implement their idea, which he didn't do because why would he?

Really? All of them? How do you know?

Why are people so angry? It seems like these guys are mostly just acting silly. I don't think it's particularly interesting or funny or whatever, but that's no reason to be mad at them.

Seconding this. I got my first Android phone recently, without even knowing about wifi calling, and it's one of my favorite features. I wish I had it when I was looking for a job and doing all of my phone interviews outside or in my car.

Really? The interviewer asked you to implement a sort on a problem that had nothing to do with sorting?

When I want to look at the train schedule, I just touch the bookmark on my home screen, which takes me to the web page with the schedule.

Swimming is only seen as recuperative by people who never swam seriously. Most competitive swimmers have experienced shoulder tendinitis, and there are many other joints under stress: ankles, elbows, neck, knees. The masters swimmers I know are very mindful of not overdoing their training intensity and volume.

I used light on dark for a long time, but now I have a Mac with a glossy screen, and a dark background makes it really easy to see reflected objects. So I have switched to dark on light.

It sounds like you're saying something similar to this: http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.h...

This was posted on HN so that we can make fun of it, and I think we're right to do so. You can be as wishy washy as you like about different situations requiring different processes, but have you ever seen somebody successfully isolate software engineering from coding and put them in sequence?

I don't understand what you're saying.

The first problem is similar to the second, yes. They both still need to be solved, so what is your point?

Unreliable services are everywhere. So what's your universal solution for dealing with them? I'll give a concrete example: suppose I have a JSON service being consumed by a Javascript web UI, and my service needs to hit some kind of authentication backend. In the event that the authentication backend server is [pick one: down, giving 500 errors, being slow], what kind of response does my service give to the Javascript app, and what kind of message or visual cue does the app give to the user? If you think the answer is something other than "it depends on exactly what the application does", then I disagree.

If you think latency is the problem, why are you talking about building in latency? It seems like you actually think chatty APIs are the problem. And, yes, chatty APIs can cause slowness. But chatty APIs often exist because they are the simplest possible design. Once you realize that there is too much back-and-forth you may have to sacrifice API usability and simplicity by adding caching and eager-loading code. Again, you think this is just something that solves itself?

I don't think creating the pipeline is the difficult part at all. When doing this kind of work I think more about things like:

- Designing usable APIs, which is to say identifying which aspects of System A are most important to System B, how the concepts should be transformed, and how the data should be aggregated.

- Catching errors thrown by one system when data is requested from another system and relaying, translating, or suppressing these errors. Also developing policies for dealing with unreliable services.

- Performance issues.

If Paul Graham realized that people can easily lose lots of money by investing, why did he devote himself to investing large amounts of his own money in high-risk businesses?

I'm not being facetious, I just think that seems contradictory. If I had a lot of money and that same knowledge, I would invest very conservatively.